Secret anti-DeMaio campaign revealed

Some of the city’s biggest movers and shakers waged a clandestine campaign last year during the San Diego mayor’s race to gather and disseminate damaging information on candidate Carl DeMaio and his longtime partner, an effort that resides in the legal gray area of campaign disclosure.

The group — financially backed by businessman Fred Maas — spent more than $33,000 to hire a true crime author to dig up dirt on DeMaio, which resulted in a 200-plus page dossier of court records and other documents that was distributed to nearly every local media outlet in early 2012 on the condition of anonymity.

Fred Maas, shown here in 2010, when he was chairman of the Centre City Development Corp.

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Fred Maas, shown here in 2010, when he was chairman of the Centre City Development Corp.

Those working on the project behind the scenes included a top aide to then-Mayor Jerry Sanders and at least three other people with ties to the mayoral campaign of Nathan Fletcher although Fletcher denies any involvement.

The information dredged up went largely unreported because many in the media considered it old, irrelevant and an untoward attempt to draw attention to DeMaio’s homosexuality during the race. The records focused mainly on legal problems involving his partner — San Diego Gay & Lesbian News Publisher Johnathan Hale.

Opposition research on high-profile candidates is commonplace in politics, but Maas and his cohorts may have run afoul of state and local campaign laws when they raised money for the project and failed to disclose its financial backers or spending activity. The group continued to resist subpoena attempts by local and state investigators for information throughout the mayor’s race as those involved tried to keep their roles in the project from being made public by saying it was a journalistic endeavor.

The group, which Maas named “Spotlight San Diego,” relented last week by filing a financial disclosure to settle a joint investigation by the San Diego Ethics Commission and the state Fair Political Practices Commission. Those agencies agreed to dismiss the case without a penalty or violation after the disclosure was filed. The FPPC issued a closure letter Wednesday to Maas stating that “the information uncovered in the investigation was not used for political purposes” under state law although the Ethics Commission contends it was.

Gil Cabrera, who served as outside counsel for the Ethics Commission on the case, said he remains confident that Spotlight San Diego violated campaign laws, but he had to weigh the diminishing returns of pursuing a fine in court given the complex nature of the case.

“From my point of view, once I determined that this was a political purpose that was being done here, my primary goal was to make sure we got disclosure and that’s what we got,” he said.

The commission’s investigation began June 14, after the mayoral primary, but Maas objected to a subpoena request for emails and financial documents until Nov. 28 — three weeks after the mayoral runoff decided the race. Up until then, investigators didn’t know what, if anything, Spotlight San Diego had done to try to influence the election.

Maas said Spotlight San Diego was always intended as an independent for-profit journalism venture and wasn’t a political operation conducting opposition research. He agreed to file the disclosure even though he believed it wasn’t necessary under the law.

“In the spirit of cooperation with them (we) filed this without going through a long and drawn out judicial process to determine whether what we did rose to the level of campaign activity or not,” Maas said.

He later added, “I still believe to this day that what we were doing was providing a good public service.”

Beyond the money

The March 14 filing, which states that “filer does not agree that the payments reported by committee are reportable contributions or expenditures,” shows that Maas contributed more than $13,000 to the cause while the city firefighters union pitched in $10,000. The Municipal Employees Association, the city’s largest union representing white-collar workers, and the Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation each gave $5,000.

The investigation, however, revealed much more than a money trail. Emails collected by the Ethics Commission and FPPC during the probe show how major players in San Diego politics assembled to try to derail DeMaio’s mayoral ambitions and went to great lengths to keep their movements out of the public eye. The U-T San Diego obtained the investigative documents through the California Public Records Act.

The trail begins with a Sept. 18, 2011, email from Sanders aide and former U-T reporter Gerry Braun to Phil Rath, president of Public Policy Strategies, with a seven-page scope of work document for investigator Caitlin Rother to “research San Diego mayoral candidate Carl DeMaio.” Rath’s firm is co-owned by political consultant Tom Shepard, who was running Fletcher’s campaign at the time.

In an interview, Braun said he got involved to help connect friends in a journalistic endeavor and that was the limit of his involvement. Rother also indicated in a February 2012 email that Braun hadn’t been involved for months.

Rother, a former U-T reporter turned author, was selected because she wrote and researched a lengthy 2005 profile of DeMaio as he emerged on the local political scene as a City Hall critic. She’s written several books, most recently the true crime novel “Lost Girls” about the death of two North County teens at the hands of a sexual predator.

Rother was to prepare packets with documents on DeMaio to be used as “the basis for a journalistic news articles(s), and/or narrative with facts and relevant points highlighted for use in campaign mailers,” according to the scope of work. Her mandate was to explore all aspects of DeMaio and Hale’s personal and professional lives as well as potentially humiliating rumors about DeMaio.

Excerpt

From Sept. 18, 2011, scope of work document for Caitlin Rother:

“Rother will meet with a small circle of trusted sources, including ideological allies of this project and other associates with crucial information, tips or their own studies on DeMaio to contribute, to better define and target the ripest issues and areas of investigation so her time will be spent strategically. Given the sensitivity of this work, Rother would like to keep this circle relatively small, with her identity and investigation kept private if at all possible. That may be a pipedream as DeMaio may have already been tipped.”

Subsequent emails show that Maas told Rath that he would initially commit $5,000 to the investigation and that Maas reached out to labor leaders Lorena Gonzalez and Michael Zucchet for money for the project. Zucchet’s union, MEA, contributed but Gonzalez didn’t.

In a Feb. 13, 2012, email, Rother indicated the work was complete and that the packets were being printed by Public Policy Strategies. She also suggested trimming the packet for “time-strapped and/or lazy reporters.”

The packet began circulating to media outlets, including the U-T, shortly thereafter. It included court records and other documents that focused primarily on the troubled past of DeMaio’s partner. It detailed Hale’s bankruptcy filing, several name changes, restraining orders filed by and against him, and theft and burglary convictions for which he received community service. Most of the documents were nearly two decades old.

Few bites

In emails, Maas, Rath and Rother expressed frustration when several news outlets declined to use the information. The U-T verified the accuracy of the documents but eventually passed because the negative elements were well in the past and didn’t involve DeMaio directly.

The LGBT Weekly became the first to report on the information on May 17 which led Rother to send an email that same day to Rath and Maas with a link to the article. The email’s subject line: “yahoo, finally!”

The publication followed up with a second article a week later and Rother wrote Rath to tell him he should point out to LGBT Weekly the other “juicy stuff” in the restraining orders.

After the June primary, in which DeMaio finished first, Rother wrote to Rath and Maas on June 12. “For now I think my job is done, the info did get out, albeit not as widely as we would have liked, and it looks like the media just won’t bite anymore,” she said.

The U-T did reference the opposition research packet in a Sept. 19 article that noted Hale’s convictions.

Spotlight San Diego paid nearly $23,000 for the research, most of which went to Rother. The rest of its spending was for the legal services of Los Angeles attorney Jim Sutton.

DeMaio referred to the project as “unfortunate games” that undermine where the focus should be: solving the problems that face the city.

“This is nothing more than the politics of personal destruction,” he said Friday. “Politics as usual. I’m proud of the campaign that we ran that focused on issues that San Diegans cared about.”

Rath said the group was interested in researching mayoral candidates and specifically interested in looking into allegations that DeMaio had falsified facts about his personal and professional life. He said the group purposely agreed to avoid electioneering activities as defined by law.

“In the end, the intensive research proved Mr. DeMaio’s story of his life and accomplishments were true — even admirable,” Rath said in an email Friday. “After the primary election, I went on to personally support candidate DeMaio’s campaign, serving on his Finance Committee and personally raising money for his race.”

Rother said that to her knowledge nothing was published by anyone involved in the project and there wasn’t any political coordination with any campaign or Sanders.

“I made it clear I would not be associated with anything but a pure information-gathering project, and I was assured that there would be a firewall between what we were doing and any campaign committee, candidate, or campaign operative,” she said in an email Friday. “Once I was finished, I stepped away, and I was told that the packet of information I produced was personally handed to reporters who would then finish the reporting by doing interviews to get responses and properly tell both sides of DeMaio’s story.”

Excerpt

From Dec. 21, 2011, Caitlin Rother email to Susan White, a former editor:

“i had a good long meeting with fred maas yesterday, who i’m cc’ing on this message, and we went over all the points you both discussed with me. i told him i’m really trying to make this work for the current CD project, but i’m not sure this will be possible after his comments to the media and how the project has been funded so far. he said he never intended for this to be an opp research project, i explained to him that i didn’t get that impression during the meetings i had with folks designated to work with me on a weekly basis — and neither did at least one of the potential donors, who i talked to — but he says that he always wanted this to be more of a journalistic endeavor …”

A rough history

The animosity between Maas and DeMaio dates back several years. The two men had a famous row during a Nov. 15, 2010, City Council meeting over legislation that then-Assemblyman Fletcher successfully carried to eliminate the cap on how much the Centre City Development Corp. could spend on downtown redevelopment. DeMaio grilled Maas, who was CCDC chairman at the time, for refusing to say how the bill he consulted on had come about.

At one point, Maas told DeMaio, “I’m not sure what ethics they taught you on (Comet) Hale-Bopp, wherever you came from …” That prompted DeMaio to suggest Maas should be fired.

The feud rose another level in December 2011 when Maas said he was part of a group looking into the councilman. Maas denied reports he put a private investigator on DeMaio and referred to it as “a journalistic enterprise in investigative journalism” that could lead to a “60 Minutes”-style documentary on DeMaio.

In a May 21 interview, Maas told Voice of San Diego the planned DeMaio documentary wouldn’t arrive before the June primary. At that point, his group had already completed its investigation and had been trying to get reporters to write about it for months under the cloak of anonymity.

While many of the players involved with the investigation supported or worked for Fletcher, he hasn’t been linked to the project. Braun, Maas and Rath were all early financial contributors and Braun volunteered on Fletcher’s campaign as a speech writer. Rath is business partners with Shepard, who ran Fletcher’s campaign. Spotlight San Diego and Fletcher’s campaign also each paid Sutton for legal advice.

Fletcher and Shepard said Friday the Fletcher campaign wasn’t involved in any way in Spotlight San Diego’s opposition research efforts.

Fletcher finished third in the June primary and many of his supporters then backed DeMaio in the November runoff against eventual winner Bob Filner.